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Stop Paying Your Student Loans CEPersVid-53

Millions of students are needlessly paying their student loans which are "under invalid" -- ie, where the amount owed is greater than the ...

Changing Careers Without Returning To College

There are a lot of people in the job market these days. Whether it is due to the economy and they have been laid off, or whether they are ready to find a career that is more fulfilling, they are searching for jobs. In some cases, they will need an edge over their fellow job hunters and they may consider going back to school. This can be an expensive investment. For many, it is worth it. However, some are struggling to make ends meet, or if they have just finished paying off their first student loan, they may not be ready to spend too much more. In other cases, people may want to change their profession. Additional education may be required, but it may not be in the budget. If you are ready to leave your current career, but you do not want to invest a fortune in another degree, there are options out there. If you have thought about joining Cleveland realtors , or you want to sell Cleveland real estate , or you picture yourself caring for people, or you would like to turn your eye for style and design into a career, you can find affordable training.

Several options exist for those who want to leave their current job for a new career. One of those options is selling homes. Getting a license to become a realtor is challenging, but it can happen in a short period of time and it is not expensive. Some states even offer a self study course. Those with an interest in selling homes can buy the study materials which often include DVDs and text books. On their own schedule, they study the course work, and when they are finished they take the test. The other option is enrolling in a class. Either option is attainable within six months.

Another option for someone who wants to escape from the rat race is becoming a natural healing professional. Massage therapy school offers a chance for nuturing people to work with others. Reputable massage therapy programs feature lessons in anatomy and pathology. However, an advanced course will enable someone to be licensed in as little as six months.

Because of the popularity of home design and decorating television shows, many have decided to turn their decorating hobby into a career. Some have realized they have a special talent for this and they want to turn it into their work. There are training courses which can prepare you and help you get started working in the field. If you are ambitious, you may be able to combine this training with a career as a realtor. There are lots of choices, so if you have reached your wit’s end with your current career, maybe it is time for a change. Training for a new path does not need to take a lot of your time and money.

Source: Real Estate Today

The Stimulus Package Explained by an MBA to a 3rd Grader **please Pass it On**

It’s kind of a point of pride for me that I am pretty good at taking complicated topics and breaking them down so everybody can understand them. So when I started looking at the stimulus package, I imagined having a conversation with a 10 y.o. about it. How would I explain it and what questions would they ask? So here’s the imaginary conversation with Timmy, a smart 10 year old 3rd grader with blue freckles. I know. I’m weird. How fast will it work? 1-5 years. Since most a lot of the spending is for infrastructure or big construction projects, it will be a while for that to trickle down. You don’t start a massive development project in a few weeks or even months. The upside is that these projects have a much greater return on investment over the long term. Lots of jobs for a long time to come. Just takes a little while to get started. Another tough question as part of the tax relief – Will $20 more a week in your paycheck really do anything to increase your spending or consumer confidence? Will you even notice it? Also, I have a feeling that most people are not going to run out and buy a new big screen when they get their tax return next year. My guess is that they are going to use it to pay off their credit card debt, student loans, car payments, or mortgage balances they have been slacking on for the last year. How fast will it work? 5-10 years minimum. These investment should all pay off handsomely, but they will take a long time. Energy independence and efficiency will eventually ease our reliance on outside energy and keep prices manageable (or at least insure that we buy from ourselves not foreign countries) Funding for education in theory will ensure that US keeps more jobs, increase US innovation, improve employment rate, and boost our GDP. To over-simplify: Greed and easy money. Banks lent money too easily in hopes of bigger profits, people spent too much on credit on stuff they really couldn’t afford, and business and people alike made risky investments in hopes of bigger profits. For a while banks were lending 95 to 100% loans. That means if you stop making payments, they take your asset (the thing you bought with the loan). If your asset loses any value (think housing market crash) then the banks are stuck owning something that is not worth as much money as you paid for it. Because they are stuck with this crap asset, they don’t have cash on hand to loan more money to other people. If the bank can’t make loans, they can’t make profits themselves (the interest they charge you for loan). End result – bank fail. Now combine that with people losing their jobs and shaky consumer confidence. As a result, consumers are not buying as many things that require a loan, and are not sticking money in the bank (which the bank then turns around and loans to other people) Vicious downward spiral. Yup. China has its own stimulus packages that it unveiled last December. China said it would spend an estimated $586 billion over the next two years to construct new railways, subways and airports and to rebuild communities devastated by an earthquake in the southwest in May. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (how much money the entire country makes on stuff that it creates), Chinas bailout is actually bigger than ours. Yup. But what really helped wasn’t designed as a stimulus package exactly. Most economists say that the HUGE government investment in WWII is what finally pulled us out of the great depression. Teddy Roosevelt enacted a series of programs called the New Deal from about 1933-1939, and it started a slow upward tick from 1933 (when it was at rock bottom with 25% unemployment). But it was really when we committed to WWII and basically said, damn the price, we need these military supplies NOW that the country got to work building them. Because of the government spending on WWII we had a simply HUGE national deficit (10 times worse than it is now) as compared to our GDP. But, within about 4 years (between 1946 at its worst and 1950 at its best) not only was the deficit pulled out of the negative, but we actually had a surplus for one of the few times in US history. Thanks in large part to all these new business now paying taxes on all the money they made, people paying taxes on the income they made from these businesses, and people now buying stuff with improved consumer confidence and all the money they made. That’s an excellent question. For 31 of the last 35 years, we have run a federal deficit. That means that the government takes in less than it spends. That’s like you having $5000 in bills a month and only making $3000 a month. That is not the same as the federal debt. The federal debt is money the government owes to its taxpayers or other countries. That’s like a credit card. You buy something now on credit and promise to pay it back later plus some additional fees for interest. Debt by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But it IS a bad thing when you are running a deficit and have no real ways of fixing that deficit anytime soon. To help fund your deficit you take on more debt, when further increases your deficit. Get it? Now, how are we going to pay to dump this $800 billion into the economy when we already have $10.7 Trillion in debt, and still have a federal deficit of about $500 billion? Option 1: We will get about 50% of the money from our Treasury selling securities to US consumers, businesses, and banks. The Treasury will sell T-Bills and bonds to us in exchange for an interest payment. They usually pay pretty crappy interest rates, but when the stock market is in such turmoil, a lot of people invest in them because they are very secure (The only time you will ever lose money on a Treasury Security is if the entire government crumbles, and if that is the case you got a LOT bigger problems than losing your money). Scenario 1: The demand for the Treasury Securities is really low. That means the Treasury has to offer really high interest rates to get people to buy them. This could cause 2 problems. First, banks have a limited amount of cash to invest. If it is more attractive for them to use peoples savings to buy Treasury Securities, than it is for them to loan money to people…they will buy the securities. That would have the opposite effect of helping the economy and would actually make things worse. Scenario 3: If Americans don’t buy the debt, eventually other countries will step in. Can you anticipate what the problem would be if China or another country holds the majority of our debt? What if China decides it wants to become a bully? Imagine you mom lets the meanest bully at school hold everything you own…your bike, your lunch money, your toys? And the only way you can get them is if he says it is ok. That’s kind of what we are talking about here. Greed: An overindulgence on the part of consumers and the banks. After WWI, businesses had a surplus of inventories and introduced the idea of credit to help sell what they had. Because people were feeling pretty confident after winning the war, they went crazy buying stuff on credit. It was an decade of getting rich and enjoying new fads. Credit made it possible to buy what you couldn’t really afford. Stock Market Crash of 1929: In the early 1920’s, because of the consumer confidence and huge amounts of money coming into businesses, it caused the first stock market bubble in the 10 years before the crash. Stock prices where unrealistically overinflated compared to their true value. Kind of like they have been for the last 10 years for us. Then in 1928 or so because of the credit debt built up and other factors, consumer confidence was shaken and then finally failed. In October of 1929 on “Black Tuesday” the market suffered its biggest loss of $15 Billion in a single day (Think how much $15 Billion was in 1929 when a new car cost $250). A month later, the stock market had lost ALL of the gains it had made in the previous 2 years. Bank Failure: Prior to the Great Depression, banks had made many loans to people, businesses, and other countries paying off THEIR war debts. They were also heavily invested in the stock market. As the recession took hold in the few years leading up to the great depression, more and more people defaulted on their loans, the stock market crashed and banks were in a position that they didn’t have the money on hand to allow people like you and me to withdraw funds from out own accounts. This caused a further panic which made EVERYBODY rush to the bank to take their money out only adding fuel to the fire. End result: Bank fail.

Source: Answer Dictionary